A pause could help in seeing our own contribution to the culture of gender violence: when we laugh off our boy’s exploits for being such a ‘Casanova’ or ‘stud,’ while we pride ourselves in curtailing our girl’s movements and dreams

Be a part of the solution: Demonstrators raise slogans during a protest in New Delhi, as they demand justice for women in wake of the gangrape case that shook the nation. Tribune photo: Manas Ranjan Bhui

As someone who has worked with rape survivors for the past 10 years, you would think I’m following the news of around the Delhi rape case closely. Instead, I keep thinking about a friend’s comment that this victim was a regular girl, “from a good family.” She meant, a family like ours. And I wonder what folks from other families like ours, who read our English dailies, have been discussing since this case.

Perhaps your family discussed how this case is relatable because we can picture ourselves (or our friends, cousins, sisters) going out to a movie with a friend and then getting on a bus at 9.30—perhaps even in time to grab a late-ish dinner. And perhaps you also discussed that the commentary around this case dangerously restricts our further understanding about rape: strangers (the ‘other’: barbaric, uneducated, the underbelly) threaten our health, safety, independence, life?

Perhaps your family discussed what the government needs to immediately do to curtail the danger of rape overnight? More streetlights, more policing, swifter and harsher punishments. But also the issue of confidence in those who police, the lack of resources for securing every possible place, and the obvious fact that these remedies will touch a miniscule percentage—even if again counting out rural, Dalit, tribal, poor—of the nation’s women.

Perhaps your family recognised the danger from men who cover and lock their women and girls and view upper-class, educated women as vile and loose? But also the fact that these men live pretty much next door to families like ours, with little interaction with families like ours, except when we pay for their menial labour, and that their sons and daughters, have lesser and lesser interaction with our sons and daughters, cementing the already gaping divide forever.

Perhaps your family supported the widespread protests—of course not the hooliganism—and related to the eruption of anger by educated women from good families. But then you may have also discussed the fact that if these women are this tormented on the streets every day, what of the majority of women who we never hear from, including the women living in the hovels where the perpetrators of this crime lived?

Perhaps your family decided it’s had enough of talking about this case.

What if your family, all our families, protested for a pause? A time to reflect without being caught in the fervour. If we paused to understand the underlying cause: not of one or another barbaric act, but of the fraying of the societal pact.

Paused to recognize that far from being a taboo, sex sells, and rape is retailed every day—on our sitcoms, movies, daily news—as its sordid shadow. When we respond only to certain types of rape cases, we participate in a very selective telling of the rape story: inextricably linked to uneducation and/or ingrained depravity. We don’t recognise the wife raped in a bedroom unabashedly; or the young nephew raped during a family gathering, deathly quietly; or the teens forced into sex while their parents remain convinced there is no dating in their family, thankfully. We also only recognise a certain kind of victim, making protecting her femininity and sexuality the business of all those around.

If we paused, we could recognise the connection between the case in Punjab that came right before: the public murder of Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Ravinder Pal Singh, who was shot for objecting to the harassment and stalking of his daughter. Or the case that immediately followed: The blatant harassment of a female ASI and the subsequent assault on her male colleagues who protested. And, of course, with countless, newsless, cases in between. We would demand that this is no Eden where a woman is harassed, attacked, or stalked: calling these crimes ‘Eve Teasing’ is no longer acceptable.

If we paused, we could think about change. The kind of change that will come from families like ours, the consumers and the trendsetters. The kind of change that will prevent families like ours from defining our men and women in certain sexualised ways; prevent us from aborting our baby girls, a practice research shows is high among families like ours; prevent us from being part of the problem. The kind of change that will compel us to engage with the majority of the nation, support equal education and gender equality in disadvantaged areas. The kind of change that will be more effective than building higher fences, employing more guards, and still being forced to hold our girls back from reclaiming the streets, transport systems, workplaces, homes.

A pause could help in seeing our own contribution to the culture of gender violence: when we laugh off our boy’s exploits for being such a ‘Casanova’ or ‘stud,’ while we pride ourselves in curtailing our girl’s movements, friends, and dreams; when we poke our noses in everyone’s business till the time comes to check a friend or relative on their abuse of their own wife; when we remark that a rape victim’s life is ‘ruined’ by weighing her worth by her virginity.

In a protesting of for a pause, we will hold a candle of solidarity to the Delhi survivor (who didn’t give up after the brutal rape, even as her body shut down) and the survivors who surround us, who never made the front pages, but who can lead a true movement for change when there is space for them as equal humans rather than ‘poor things.’

The writer is a lawyer who focuses on gender and
minority issues in the United States and South Asia.